Shortly after publishing my last post, I started feeling sick. Yep, I had COVID. This led to listening to a bunch of free mysteries on Audible that were so militantly mediocre that when I fell asleep (a frequent occurrence), I didn't worry about going back and figuring out what I missed. They will not be mentioned further here.
Now that I'm mostly recovered and am caught up on the work I missed while sick, I'm trying to refocus. It's hard . . .
Fiction
Emily Henry's Book Lovers appears on NPR's "Books We Love" list for 2022. Granted, it's a long list (400 titles), but I don't think Book Lovers belongs on it. It's a romance novel featuring a book editor and a literary agent, who hate each other on first meeting but very quickly thereafter find each other nigh-on irresistible. Passable escapist listening when one has COVID; otherwise, no.
I had had a book titled The Writing on the Wall on my TBR list for a few years. After I read the book by W.D. Wetherill, I discovered the book on my list was by a different author. But this one was interesting. It features three protagonists--Vera, a modern-day teacher whose daughter is in some at-first-unnamed legal difficulty; Beth, a young married woman wishing she could get an education in Post-WWI America; and Dottie, a nurse whose son has enlisted in the Army during the Vietnam era. What makes the book interesting is that Vera discovers the latter two women as she is pealing wallpaper in a mountain getaway her sister has purchased. Vera is staying there trying to come to terms with her daughter's situation and has volunteered to help rehab the house to thank her sister. Beth and Dottie, it turns out, wrote their stories on the walls of the house and then covered them with wallpaper. There's a strong anti-war message in the three women's stories, as well as a theme of women's need to tell their stories even if they're never heard. To me, it didn't seem like a very realistic way of telling one's story, but I did enjoy the book. Meanwhile, the other The Writing on the Wall is still on the TBR list.
I admire Gabrielle Zevin's work because every new book is totally fresh. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is no exception. Sam and Sadie became friends when Sam was in the hospital following a terrible car accident in which his mother was killed and he was seriously injured; Sadie visited him regularly but their friendship ended abruptly when he learned she was receiving community service credits for visiting him. They run into each other years later when he is at Harvard and she is at MIT; they start developing a game together and eventually become successful game developers. There are ups and downs in their business and their relationship and, as they experience these ups and downs the reader is challenged to think about disability and how one copes with physical pain, the benefits of building alternative worlds and playing in them, art, what makes a good teacher (not sleeping with students), and cultural violence. Sometimes Zevin went a little deeper into various aspects of gaming and game development than I needed to go, but overall, I enjoyed the book.
I don't have high expectations for the free books you can get from Audible and Amazon, but occasionally one surprises me. I Came to Say Goodbye by Caroline Overington was one of those. It was doubly surprising because it involved a plethora of issues--parenting ranging from questionable to abusive; the perfidy of the social welfare system, particularly child protective services; immigration to Australia; female genital mutilation; treatment available for the mentally ill; quacks promoting misinformation about children's health. And it's narrated by a father and daughter who have some serious character flaws--yet I ended up caring about them. Maybe I've gotten soft.
Mystery/Thriller
If you liked the movie Memento, you will find the premise of Stay Awake by Megan Goldin familiar. I definitely can't adequately describe the plot, but here's an attempt: Protagonist Liv has a rare form of amnesia: when she wakes up, she has forgotten everything that came before. Her arms are covered with admonitions like "Don't fall asleep." Her low-rent apartment, when she can find it, contains many Post-its with similar messages. When she sees "Wake Up" painted, in blood, on the window of an apartment where a man she knows (although she doesn't remember him!) was murdered, she fears she is being set up. I'll stop there to avoid spoilers. Goldin doesn't execute her idea perfectly and Liv can be an annoying character, but I enjoyed the book.
Nonfiction
Questlove is a very smart man, and what he doesn't know about music is likely not worth knowing. In fact, his encyclopedic knowledge of music sometimes made it hard for me to track where he was going in Music Is History, in which he starts the year he was born and examines musical highlights and historical connections year by year. He also puts together playlists that support the themes he identifies for various years. I respect this work, but someone younger and more knowledgeable about contemporary music would probably "get it" more fully than I did. Since I listened to this as I was recovering from COVID, I might have had some brain fog (how's that as a way to excuse myself for keeping up with Questlove's genius?).
My sister-in-law Kathy recommended Kal Penn's You Can't Be Serious, so I picked it up and found it both entertaining and informative. Penn ("real" name Kalpen Modi) basically tells his story in four large chunks: growing up as a somewhat nerdy Indian American kid in New Jersey (not gravitating toward his extended family's career expectations for him), his efforts (eventually successful) to make it in Hollywood in the face of rampant discrimination, his time working in the Obama Administration (he remains a big fan of how President Obama approached governing), and his efforts to get a show featuring a multiethnic cast treated fairly by NBC (spoiler: that did not happen). I guess I am naive, but I did not expect that discrimination in the entertainment industry would have been so open in the 1990s and early 2000s and would remain so institutionalized in the 2010s. Sad. I had read when the book was published that Penn came out in his memoir. Somehow, this "big news" kind of approach had prepped me for a lot of angst about the process. Totally not hte case. He writes about dating guys and finding his somewhat unlikely fiance in a matter of fact manner, which feels like the way LGBTQ+ people should be able to write about their lives. Recommended.
Poetry
I read Elizabeth Alexander's memoir about her husband's death and thought it was brilliant. I've also enjoyed a couple of Mellon Foundation (she is currently the President) webinars that she facilitated. Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 is her first poetry collection I have read. Many of her poems focus on African American history and life--I especially enjoyed the series of poems on Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color and the poem "Tina Green," that tells a
small story, hair story, Afro-American story
only-black-girl-in-my-class story,
pre-adolescence story, black-teacher story.
Another theme of her work is family (there's a series on postpartum dreams that is wild). I found "Cleaning Out Your Apartment," written about her grandfather, deeply moving.
A fifty-year-old resume
that says you raised delphiniums.
Health through Vegetable Juice,
your book of common prayer,
your bureau, bed, your easy chair,
dry Chivas bottles, mop and broom
pajamas on the drying rack,
your shoe trees, shoe-shine box.
I keep your wicker sewing kit,
your balsa cufflink box. There's
only my framed photograph to say,
you were my grandfather.
Outside, flowers everywhere
the bus stop, santeria shop.
Red and blue, violent lavender.
Impatiens, impermanent, swarm.
Among my other favorites in the collection are the poem she read at President Obama's inauguration in 2009 ("Praise Song for the Day") and a poem on "Butter" that ends with a reference to Little Black Sambo, which was an odd reading moment--but still, it's about butter!
Favorite Passages
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
Excerpt from "Praise Song for the Day," by Elizabeth Alexander
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